Song of the Day: My Bloody Valentine “Soft As Snow”

Kicking off My Bloody Valentine‘s 1988 LP, Isn’t Anything, “Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside)”, strikes me as a highly appropriate choice given the snow falling on DC as a I write this. The song is a pulsing, shoegaze anthem, featuring a fantastically warped guitar line from Kevin Shields that sounds like it was made by a tunefully malfunctioning jet engine. Sheilds and Colm Ó Cíosóig jointly collaborated from the lyrics that appear to use the idea of seeking shelter from a winter storm for sexual vulnerability.

My Bloody Valentine were founded in Dublin, Ireland in 1983 and are one of the great noise rock/ shoe gaze bands. They combined studio perfectionism, strange guitar sounds, feedback and ethereal vocals into a swirling kaleidoscope of sound that remains innovative, influential and compulsively listenable to this day. The band claim not to be named after the cult 1981 Canadian slasher film of the same name, which is, in many ways, hugely disappointing.

Despite being critical darlings during their initial run, My Bloody Valentine never sold that many records. Kevin Shields‘ studio perfectionism, in particular, proved to be part of their undoing. His legendary attempts to complete a follow-up to the band’s 1991 masterpiece album, Loveless, saw the band fall apart, the group’s record label, Creation go under due to the immense recording costs that the group had stacked up and Shields‘ overall mental health decline for decades. Out of nowhere, in 2007, the band reunited and resumed regularly touring. In 2013, the group released their long-delayed third studio album, m b v, and are said to be currently working on new music.